Learning OpenGL in 2026

The Entire 52 Day Playlist of me learning OpenGL in 2026.

By Zed A. Shaw on Nov 12, 2026

Learning OpenGL in 2026

I recently completed a 52 day series of videos where I learned OpenGL in 2026. I used a resource that was so bad I'm actually not going to recommend it here. One reason I continued with it was so I could do a full review of this terrible learning material without people claiming I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing, and that's thanks to this terrible course you can find online that everyone recommends and has horrible bugs in it.

The outcome of this was a series of videos that also has quite a lot of debugging sessiostns in it. If you're looking for videos showing real programmers solving real bugs then look for the videos with DEBUG in the titles. Those are ones where I had to find some obscure bug. You'll notice a lot of the sessions are debugging, and a lot of that has to do with the terrible quality of the original code combined with the terrible quality of OpenGL in general.

Also on Day 14 I refactor the original terrible code into something I can maintain, so if you're curious about how someone might refactor some code, then watch those.

YouTube Playlist

If you prefer YouTube this entire list is available there as the Learning OpenGL in 2026 playlist on Youtube. I find playlists on YouTube to be fairly random, so if you ever get lost then come back to this page to get the more accurate list.

Full Video List

Here is every video in order. I recommend you either watch these casually as background noise, or specifically focus on the ones labeled with DEBUG.

The Bezos2 Sessions

I'm currently reimplementing Bezos Loves Slides using only OpenGL with Lua as the way you control it. This is mostly to confirm that I learned something from this terrible OpenGL course, but also to set myself up for another course in OpenGL to see if there's a better way to do it. I feel like there's a "modern" OpenGL method that's better documented in another book. I'll get a first version of Bezos2 kind of working then do another series on Learning OpenGL.

You can follow the Bezos2 Series on Youtube and I'm already 20 days in, but each day is much shorter. I'm also going pretty slow, implementing only small features each day and experimenting.

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